Mike Matas (the guy who designed Watson's icons) and Wil Shipley (who founded OmniGroup) have teamed up to create a software company called Delicious Monster and a program called Delicious Library. You may not have thought you needed a program to catalog your books, videos, games, and so forth — but as soon as you try it out, you will need this program.
Delicious Library is exquisite. It won first place (U.S.) in O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Contest, and it deserves it. I watched people's jaws drop when they saw it demonstrated at the conference this week.
The attention to detail in the application — OK, also the innovative use of the iSight as a barcode reader — is what makes this program shine. Within seconds of putting your item's UPC code up to your iSight (or zapped it with your barcode scanner or typed in the code), it has grabbed all sorts of information about the product from Amazon.com's web site. Including the picture, which the program adjusts cleverly to appear as if it's actually a plastic-encased DVD (or whatever media) sitting on your shelf. (It makes the thumbnail picture that you see on Amazon's web site look as sophisticated as a PC running DOS!)
But wait, there's more. You can import people from your address book, and via drag and drop, check out anything in your library to your friends. Set the due date, from the program or via iCal with two-way integration. It's really cool.
I'm sure there are more features I haven't mentioned, and I know of some other cool features that are on the way after version 1 is released. Go to their site and sign up for notification of the program's release (due less than two weeks from now) so you can be the first on your block to have your entire media library scanned into your computer. This application will be big.